Ben Cundiff, a new member of the Kentucky Board of Education, says the commonwealth’s schools need more priority in funding from the state legislature.
Cundiff, the owner and operator of Cundiff Farms in Cadiz, is one of five new members of the state board of education. In an interview with the state Department of Education’s Kentucky Teacher publication, Cundiff says major changes to school systems cost money and that a lack of funding from the General Assembly has caused Kentucky to dip in national rankings.
"It’s funded differently than it was funded in 1990 when the school laws changed," Cundiff told Kentucky Teacher. "Given inflation and the issues schools have to deal with, it seems to be more and more inadequate. The legislature funds a lot of priorities higher than education, which I think is totally wrong.”
In the interview, Cundiff also says achievement gaps can be narrowed by increasing early childhood education and that he’d like to see school guidance counselors freed up to concentrate solely on getting students ready for college. He also said teachers' starting salaries should be raised to make it a more competitive field.
“Frankly, I believe that the answer in the long run will be to become more like Finland or South Korea or Singapore, where the teacher pool comes from the top 15 percent of the graduates from the best universities," Cundiff said. "It’s very competitive for the jobs and they pay like a professional engineering job, for instance. To translate it into Kentucky terms, I kind of see a future somewhere down the road where it’s very competitive to get a teaching job and when you do, you would start at maybe $80,000 instead of $30,000. You’d have the respect that you deserved, but you’d have the ability that comes from being that high up in your class in college.”
Cundiff has also served on the boards of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, The Center for Gifted Studies at Western Kentucky University and the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.
